With the growing popularity of variable data printing technology and other automatic document layout technology, document authors can efficiently produce customised documents in large quantities in a short period of time.
In order to reduce labour cost and processing time for monitoring the quality of many generated documents, different methods have been explored. One approach is to evaluate the aesthetic quality of documents using software algorithms so that documents of poor quality can be identified or screened out automatically. There exist a number of methods that examine different aspects of document appearance to assess the aesthetic quality of a document. However, those methods generally aim to generate a single score to reflect measured aesthetic quality. When such a score falls below a predefined threshold, a document may have an unacceptable aesthetic quality. Unfortunately, no information apart from the single score is provided. In other words, there is no way to figure out what aspect of the document makes the document of poor quality. Typically such documents must be manually examined to ascertain why the score was below the threshold and to determine what corrections may be necessary to restore the document to suitability.
Aesthetic quality is a subjective judgement depending on the eyes of the beholder. Given a set of documents, different evaluators may place emphasis on different parts of the documents based on the goals and requirements of application contexts. Known methods are limited and inflexible as they provide no way to allow users to impose their own individualistic perception into the process of aesthetic evaluation of documents.
Different types of documents comprise different layout structures. Some documents, such as product brochures, are made up of different sections of different design styles contributing to the overall theme or layout. Nevertheless, current aesthetic evaluation methods measure aesthetic quality based on the assumption that documents only have a single design style. Accordingly, those methods may not be able to accurately evaluate documents containing multiple disparate design styles.